Quote Originally Posted by Stolly View Post
I can see where longdogs is coming from and I appreciate that dog rescue compounds have far far too many dogs but, if you take longdogs argument to the limit, you could equally argue that we should adopt children before 'breeding' our own or not have children at all because there are too many living off of rubbish heaps in Indian slums. Its sort of an anti capitalism argument also (not that I'm any great capitalist) but dog breeders breed dogs that people want to buy don't they? They are satisfying a demand. And surely the biggest problem with regard to dog rescue centres is that people get dogs but then can't look after them. Anecdotally I suspect that a high proportion of people that pay a lot of money for a dog will not be the type of people who can't look after them. In Skipton recently for example three working border collies all sold from specialist breeders for upwards of £4,500!!
Most of the dogs i am talking about die before they ever reach a rescue centre. As far as i know we don't kill excess children that nobody wants, nor do we deliberately breed deformed ones for money.

Purely in economic terms yes, dog breeders satisfy a demand. If they were manufacturing an inanimate object, fine, but these are sentient beings. It's quite incorrect that people are more capable of looking after a dog if they pay good money for it- simply wrong, there's loads of data to support that. If people were educated about the myths that they believe- we know what we're getting, we can train it how we like, we need this breed to do that job etc etc, there wouldn't be such a market. No doubt i come across as over emotional about it, and probably i am, but i can promise you i haven't made this stuff up. Over the last 10 years or so i've read thousands of journals, research papers and books, and seen hundreds of individual cases, and its quite clear that these myths are not true. They seem common-sensical, just as it seemed quite common-sensical once that you would sail off the end of the world, but they are not true.

If anyone wants to bite the bullet and face their ingrained prejudice, feel free to PM me and i can direct you to some of the data.

P.S an anecdote you might like... yesterday i killed a 9 month old Rottweiler with possible orthopaedic disease. The owners weren't willing to pay for either diagnosis or treatment because a new dog is cheaper. If you think that's an unrepresentative tale, come and walk in my shoes for a week.